Chief among my favourite Facebook memories is the time that a high-powered journalist of my acquaintance breezily informed us all that he was at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons with Ted Danson, tucking into some sea urchin. To which one friend responded, "That's funny, because I'm at the Midtown tunnel with Rhea Perlman, eating shawarma."
While some frequent users of social media are merely fabulous, others savvily buff their fabulousness to a dazzling gleam, becoming "fahvolous". At no point in the year is this more evident than in August and early September, when Facebook and Instagram swell with the plump, juicy, sun-ripened harvest of summer: vacation photos.
What prompts the excessive posting of these pictures?
William Haynes, a 22-year-old comedian who hosts the SourceFed show People Be Like, said: "I like how my generation is all about sharing. What's the point of having a vacation unless you can tell people about it immediately? If you can get a few Instagram photos out of it, you've made your money back."
Indeed, the motivation behind many "fahvolous" vacation photos would seem to be a rationalisation of large expenditures for the purpose of recreation: a $6,000 beach rental ought to bring you $6,000 worth of pleasure, and maybe posting a photo will get the dopamine flowing.
But one can detect other motives, too: a tone-deaf attempt at self-branding, a neurotic attempt to thank your host, a need for constant scrutiny.
Noxious selfie sticks now seem like nothing compared to the sophisticated camera filters that can turn an average-looking strawberry patch into a brooding welter of Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro.
Some people even hire professional photographers to take their vacation snaps for them. In the future, it may be unsurprising at a lakeside picnic to hear a camera-wielding nephew turn to his Aunt Marjorie and ask: "What's your day rate?"
Equally jarring, some Instagram and Facebook users seem to want us to know that their summer is more inherently summery than ours: more barefoot, more glistening, more sarong-driven.
These folks are biting into the fresh fig of life, and this biting produces carefree laughter. My natural habitat is an oceanside bonfire where a Viggo Mortensen lookalike strums a weathered guitar! All backyards are enlivened by a spray of eight-year-old girls in sundresses! Everything I eat in August is cooked on a stick!
While it's fairly easy to categorise the photographically incontinent under the headlines Narcissistic and Insecure, or some combination thereof, the photo-posting folks may not have the same clarity about themselves. "People often don't know that they're the culprit," said Marla Vannucci, a clinical psychologist who is an associate professor at Adler University.
"I have a client who really wants Likes, so he posts a lot of photos," Dr Vannucci said. "When people don't respond to them, he feels very alone. So he posts more. It's a cycle like any interpersonal cycle in which we're doing something that people hate but we're doing it to try to make people like us."
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
While some frequent users of social media are merely fabulous, others savvily buff their fabulousness to a dazzling gleam, becoming "fahvolous". At no point in the year is this more evident than in August and early September, when Facebook and Instagram swell with the plump, juicy, sun-ripened harvest of summer: vacation photos.
What prompts the excessive posting of these pictures?
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Indeed, the motivation behind many "fahvolous" vacation photos would seem to be a rationalisation of large expenditures for the purpose of recreation: a $6,000 beach rental ought to bring you $6,000 worth of pleasure, and maybe posting a photo will get the dopamine flowing.
But one can detect other motives, too: a tone-deaf attempt at self-branding, a neurotic attempt to thank your host, a need for constant scrutiny.
Noxious selfie sticks now seem like nothing compared to the sophisticated camera filters that can turn an average-looking strawberry patch into a brooding welter of Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro.
Some people even hire professional photographers to take their vacation snaps for them. In the future, it may be unsurprising at a lakeside picnic to hear a camera-wielding nephew turn to his Aunt Marjorie and ask: "What's your day rate?"
Equally jarring, some Instagram and Facebook users seem to want us to know that their summer is more inherently summery than ours: more barefoot, more glistening, more sarong-driven.
These folks are biting into the fresh fig of life, and this biting produces carefree laughter. My natural habitat is an oceanside bonfire where a Viggo Mortensen lookalike strums a weathered guitar! All backyards are enlivened by a spray of eight-year-old girls in sundresses! Everything I eat in August is cooked on a stick!
While it's fairly easy to categorise the photographically incontinent under the headlines Narcissistic and Insecure, or some combination thereof, the photo-posting folks may not have the same clarity about themselves. "People often don't know that they're the culprit," said Marla Vannucci, a clinical psychologist who is an associate professor at Adler University.
"I have a client who really wants Likes, so he posts a lot of photos," Dr Vannucci said. "When people don't respond to them, he feels very alone. So he posts more. It's a cycle like any interpersonal cycle in which we're doing something that people hate but we're doing it to try to make people like us."
© 2016 The New York Times News Service